The Yorkshire Post has a story about an exhibit at Chatsworth House of Cecil Beaton’s photographs. The photos themselves are mostly from Southebys but the subjects of these photos are visitors to Chatsworth. One of the photos is of Evelyn Waugh. Also on display is a letter he wrote to Deborah Devonshire thanking her for a visit he made to Chatsworth in 1957. The letter is addressed:
to âDearest Deboâ. Itâs written on headed notepaper from Renishaw Hall, the Sitwellsâ Derbyshire family home.
Waugh â pictured by Beaton as a cigar-smoking country squire â had just visited Chatsworth. He wrote that Renishaw, with its âhousehold of aged bachelorsâ, was âa sombre contrastâ to Chatsworth â âno television, no telephone in the public rooms, no bonfires, no gin before half past noon. The talk is mostly of medicines.â
Waugh was apparently a demanding house guest, asking for Malvern water on his bedside table at Chatsworth and claiming, probably jokingly, to have discovered a full chamber pot under his bed. He subsequently sent the Duchess a book as a gift.
âIt had a note with it: âYou wonât find a word in these pages that you wonât likeâ,â says Charlotte Johnson, the exhibitionâs research assistant. âIt was a completely blank book.â
The letter from Renishaw is reproduced in Letters, p. 493. The chamberpot incident was, as explained by Waugh to Nancy Mitford, Deborah’s sister,  sparked by Waugh’s upset that Deborah insisted upon watching television during meals. This may also explain the reference to absence of a television at Renishaw. The blank book had a binding showing the title of Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox. It contained an inscription, but not quite the one as quoted by the Yorkshire Press. It was inscribed “in the certainty that not one word of this will offend your Protestant persuasion.” In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, pp. 60-61. Meanwhile, in today’s New York Times there is an article in the Sunday Styles section about what might be termed a wave of Beatonmania sweeping the art, fashion and even furniture worlds. Among the examples is the exhibit at Chatsworth which opens on March 19.
NOTE (21 March 2016): The Daily Telegraph has run a feature story about this exhibit. Here’s a reference to Deborah Devonshire’s comments on Waugh:
According to the Duchessâs memoir, Evelyn Waugh could also be âtricky companyâ due to the âphenomenal amount of drink the writer downed⊠You had to catch him early in the evening. He wanted to be friends and was full of compliments, but they turned to insults before you knew were you wereâ. Waugh, though, knew on which side his bread was buttered, and lavished letters and gifts of his books on the Duchess in recompense.